Terms and conditions

These terms cover your use of WordCounter4U and the tools on it. By using the site you accept them. They are deliberately short, because a free browser-based tool does not need a long contract.

What the service is

WordCounter4U provides free writing tools that run in your browser: a word counter with readability and keyword analysis, and a typing test. No account is required, nothing is charged, and no feature is held back behind a payment.

Your content stays yours

You keep every right in the text you put through these tools. We claim no licence over it, and could not exercise one if we did: your text is processed inside your own browser and never reaches our servers. You are responsible for having the right to use the text you paste or upload.

Acceptable use

You may use the tools for anything lawful, including commercial and academic work, without attribution. What you may not do is aimed at protecting the service rather than restricting you:

• Do not attempt to disrupt, overload or gain unauthorised access to the site or its administration area.
• Do not scrape, frame or republish the site's articles and page content as your own.
• Do not present the tools as your own product or service.
• Do not use the site to break the law or to infringe someone else's rights.

Accuracy, and its limits

The formulas behind every figure are published on our about page precisely so you can judge them. They are still models. Readability scores, speaking time and reading time are estimates that depend on assumptions which may not match your situation, and keyword density is a diagnostic rather than a target.

Where a word count must satisfy a third party — a university, a publisher, a client — their definition of a word governs, not ours. Check against their tool before you submit. We are not liable for a submission rejected on a count.

Provided as it is

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability. The site may change, break, or be withdrawn without notice.

Because your work is held only in your browser tab, a crash, a closed tab or a cleared session will lose it. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. We cannot recover it, as we never had it.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or for lost work, lost profit or lost opportunity, arising from use of this site. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Advertising and third-party services

The site is funded by advertising and uses Google Analytics and Google AdSense, as described in our privacy policy. Adverts are supplied by third parties and their presence is not an endorsement. Any dealing you have with an advertiser is between you and them.

Open-source components

The offline speech engine that produces audio downloads is built on eSpeak and meSpeak, released under the GNU General Public Licence, and MP3 encoding uses lamejs under the LGPL. Those components remain under their own licences, and nothing in these terms overrides them.

Intellectual property

The site's name, design, articles and page copy belong to us. You are welcome to quote an article with attribution and a link; republishing it wholesale is not permitted.

Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated as the site changes. The date at the foot of the page shows when they were last revised, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms.

Contact

Anything unclear here, or a concern about how the tools are being used, can be raised through our contact page.